GRANT COUNTY — While it isn’t unusual for Grant County to have a significant snow event this time of year, there were a number of public safety incidents related to the winter storm that hit Thursday, Feb. 23, public officials said.

On the streets of John Day, the snowplows were out in force and shopkeepers and residents alike had shovels in hand for a daylong dusting that left several inches of snow on roads and sidewalks.

Grant County Sheriff Todd McKinley said school buses around the county reported trouble navigating the roads and dropping off students, while people driving through the lighted intersection in downtown John Day had problems. There were no weather-related injuries in the county from the winter storm.

“There were several near-misses in the intersection with (cars) sliding around in the ice,” McKinley said.

The sheriff said a female student was driving home from school in Dayville when she ran off the road at milepost 152, 2 miles west of Mt. Vernon.

The car left the roadway and crashed into a parked vehicle at a residence, said McKinley, who added there were no injuries associated with the incident.

Also, a snowplow on Highway 26, at Dixie Summit east of Prairie City, slid off onto the shoulder of the road, McKinley said.

“There were just multiple slide-offs throughout the county,” he said.

John Day resident Heidi Wolf had her own adventure with icy roads late Wednesday and into early Thursday morning when she, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend got stranded for 10 hours along Interstate 84 on their way to Portland to watch her son, Lucas Wolf, 18, compete in the state wrestling tournament.

Lucas, a wrestler for the combined Grant Union/Prairie City high school wrestling team, had arrived in Portland earlier on a school bus. But icy conditions on I-84 in the Columbia Gorge near Multnomah Falls on Wednesday left traffic for his mother, who was driving a Ford F-150 truck, at a standstill 30 miles east of Portland.

Wolf finally arrived in Portland at 4:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, after not having had anything to eat or drink and worrying about running out of gas to power the truck’s heater.

“It’s just mentally exhausting,” Wolf said of the ordeal. “You’re not only stuck there, but you also have semi trucks and cars just sliding all around you. Every time you would move, somebody would try and cut through somebody and pretty soon you’re sliding. You’re just praying they stop before they slam into you.”

Joe Solomon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pendleton, said the amount of snow falling throughout Oregon was more than computer modeling had led forecasters to expect.

“We still have weather events, especially in the mountain areas, that occur into the spring,” Solomon said. “It’s not a surprise in the sense that snow was in the forecast. I think the magnitude of it was a surprise.”

Solomon said the weather subsystem that produced the statewide event was just off the coast of Oregon and created “a southerly flow that brought the moisture around that low up into Eastern Oregon.”